NEW GORE TALK: 20 MINUTES OF INSPIRATION

At TEDTalks, the greatest minds in the world are required to boil their best stuff down to 20 inspiring minutes. TEDTalks’ logline: “Inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers.” A TEDTalks appearance has come to mean something, like winning an award.

In a recent encore appearance, Nobel laureate, Academy Award-winner and former Vice President Al Gore was unusually succinct, upbeat and newly inspiring.

Gore’s self-described optimism is based on a renewed commitment to action in the public arena. Gore: “In order to be optimistic about this, we have to become incredibly active as citizens in our democracy. In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis.”

He expressed some frustration at the still-limited public awareness about climate change. But he has a new perspective: “History has presented us with a choice…Sometimes I hear people respond to the disturbing facts of the climate crisis by saying, ‘Oh, this is so terrible. What a burden we have.’

“I would like to ask you to reframe that. How many generations in all of human history have had the opportunity to rise to a challenge that is worthy of our BEST efforts? A challenge that can pull from us more than we knew we could do. I think we ought to approach this challenge with a sense of profound joy and gratitude that we are the generation about which a thousand years from now philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying ‘they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future.’ Let’s do THAT.”

Gore ended by quoting an African proverb: “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” He then pointed out that the world now needs to go far, quickly. For that, he called for a new sense of urgency and a new sense of commitment. He clearly has found those things for himself.

Watch Gore's TEDTalk.

Al Gore: New thinking on the climate crisis
March-April 2008 (TEDTalks)

WHO
Al Gore of The Climate Project, The Alliance for Climate Projection and we can solve the climate crisis; TEDTalks (Chris Andersen, founder).

Gore accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. (click to enlarge)

WHAT
- Al Gore, Nobel laureate, Academy Award winner and former Next-President-of-the-United-States, made a brand new, half-hour presentation at the TEDTalks, describing a big new campaign to enlist public support for the fight against global climate change.

WHEN
Gore’s appearance was in March. The half-hour video of his talk was just released.

click to enlarge

WHERE
- Gore’s talk focused on this world.
- He did mention, in passing, the fantasy world of those who sill deny the reality of global climate change, introducing yet more evidence of how wrong they are.
- TEDTalks recently relocated from Monterrey, CA, to the Terrace Theatre in Long Beach, CA.

WHY
- Gore talked about new evidence of worsening global climate change and challenges his listeners to be the generation that takes on this phenomenon and the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement -- to set it right.
- Gore returned to the familiar slide of the greenhouse phenomenon to highlight new information further proving earth’s heating is the result not of increased sun heat but of the greenhouse effect by showing the upper atmosphere to be cooling even as the lower atmosphere heats.
- He advocated a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants until carbon-capture-and-sequestration technology is implemented.
- He quoted Buckminster Fuller: “If the future of all human civilization depended on me, what would I do? What would I be?”

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QUOTES
- Gore: “…as important as it is to change the light bulbs, it’s more important to change the laws.”
- Gore: “Earth and Venus are..essentially the same size. They have the exactly the same amount of carbon. But the difference is that on earth most of the carbon has been leeched out of the ground, deposited in the earth as coal, oil, natural gas, etc. On Venus most of it is in the atmospehere…our temperature is 59 degrees, on average. On Venus, it’s 855. This is relevant to our current strategy of taking as much carbon out of the ground as quickly as possible and putting it into the atmosphere.”
- TEDTalks: “Ideas Worth Spreading”